Hospital Productions 20 Year Anniversary in New York

Hospital Productions 20 Year Anniversary in New York
At a heritage site in Brooklyn on Saturday, experimental music cemented its relationship with metal in celebration of Hospital Productions' 20th anniversary. The daylong showcase went down at The Warsaw, a cavernous theatre in Greenpoint that seemed lost to time with its Victorian chandeliers, velvet curtains and indoor smoking lounge. A collaboration between two New York promoters, Popgun and the all-female Quo Vadis, the event featured a number of performances by industrial noise artists like Regis, Prurient and Orphx.

Wandering into the antiquated theatre, as harrowing modular soundscapes bled from inside, felt like a descent into the nightmarish lull of Hospital's harsh noise. The room was fit to bursting with a distinctly alternative crowd—head-to-toe leather with plenty of ornamental metal was the evening's uniform. At first pass, it looked like a punk show.

The space became a playground for amorphous experiments in sound. Live modular sonics bellowed from the stage and shook the walls. The aggressive pulse of the strobes, made warmer by sunset-red hues, gave the impression of near-total darkness for most of the event, though there was something comforting about the way the softer colours contrasted with the tremendous and often foreboding music.

Acts like Geography Of Hell called for rapt observation rather than any kind of movement, with their sparse and meditative sounds drawn out like hypnotic tangents. Alberich and Lussuria's collaborative performance was otherworldly, swathing the space in tortured drones that, at times, obliterated the notion of musicality altogether, to stirring emotional effect. Patrick O'Neil's grating noise project, Skin Crime, produced anguished explorations of static that occasionally wove delicate tones into its coarse wall of sound.

Everyone in the venue seemed present to watch Orphx, who followed later in the evening with a live set of techno and industrial. The Canadian duo frantically adjusted wires as a hazy piece of spoken-word by Rich Oddie coasted over the turbulent drum loops, their violent edges perforating the set's softer spells. It was both gritty and abstract.

The event struck a nuanced balance between pulse-driven sets, full of brash walls of sound, and those with more languidly unfolding narratives. Overall, it was a lengthy look at the subtle intersections between various challenging genres, watched on by a limber crowd that were there to appreciate the all-encompassing extremities of noise.